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Ownership of a domain and control for technical reasons are 2 different things. Ownership is overall control and legal status on a domain. In the UK Nominet would look at the Who-is to see WHO owns a domain.

This brings me to a local person/company that is in the field of web design and support that’s been going for some years now and their actions with some domains the control.

Going through their client portfolio and doing a who is look up on each of them I’d say 90%+ are registered to him personally. I found this out and dug deeper, this was brought to my attention when I spoke to an EX client of his who explained he wanted to offer a new website and they wanted to leave it and get quotes elsewhere been a current client of his.

In refusing to carry on HIS service and not to go ahead to have a new and quite expensive (for the quality) he suspended hosting and took the website down. He could do this because he had control of the hosting & domain but more importantly he OWNED the clients domain name.

As mentioned above the owner of a domain has overall control and ownership which in a legal and professional world the company commissioning/paying for work on a website should be the legal owner.

So a tip for me, go to http://www.nic.uk and enter your company domain name (if UK domain) and http://whois.domaintools.com for all other extensions.

Ask this question do you legally now own the domain name? Now approach the company you paid our to build your website and ask them to transfer ownership to your company. What response did you get?

Good luck and always think economical websites may have hidden pitfalls.

A shopping e commerce site selling photo prints, art and frames was the request of a local “Doug” from the company Bay Tree Image.

What I came up with is Baytree-image.co.uk Using WordPress and the “ShopperPress” theme made the job a lot easier for myself and Doug to understand how to manage it.

As a keen photographer but not so keen techie guy proved a little bit of a battle to get round issues and for Doug to follow how things work. I previously setup and started the site in Magento which would have been a big mistake due to the intricate options and CMS structure.

I have a few sites myself that I will be using ShopperPress on including PlayParachutes.co.uk which will make any future sales of the site a little easier for maintaining and demos.

This post is a bit of a moan and a blatant plug for the best advertising money you’ll spend within Hull!

Formed our limited company around April 08 and submitted the company details to many directories and other sites alike for free.

From that day on (un-ticking the box I wish to receive news letters etc) we have had nothing but a constant bombardment of phone calls and spam emails from most of them. I know they have to make money and to follow up listings but the annoying thing is when they try and sell us a listing and then when we decline SEO or a new website. They clearly have no idea,

That’s what we do!

Two points that bug me –

First of all, the call centre person who calls you has no idea what a company offers, who then calls them up to get a listing upgraded to pay annually and just wants your card details.

The next day not giving 2 hoots what happens to your listing or business leads now they have their commission and another tick in their box. This is backed up by everyone I’ve spoke to having NO results from paid listing on these national directories.

Really isn’t right that is it?

This got more and more grinding as the months went on. I asked clients and businesses at networking events, do you get these calls and confirmed –

“All the time! Bloody annoying”

Knowing how people generally do searches online using Google, Yahoo, BING and other search engines using a Geo location and service or product required. We decided to start buying up all Hull related domains, Services, products e.g. HullBeds.co.uk, you get the idea where we were going by covering all angles.

100’s of domains

100 hour’s, late nights and long weekends

£xxxx’s for registration fee’s and secondary market domains

We had a solid network of domains and a main directory they all interact with in some way- Hull Local.

We have found people like to speak to faces and real people, not some guy or voices at the end of the phone. We didn’t want to try and create a national directory but kept it a local one just to Hull which also made sense for travel and getting to know businesses. We don’t just expose your business from one website/directory which limits how many times you can be shown in search results but a whole spread of websites.

An example, If your company sells blinds, you can be listed under our Blinds, Conservatory, and Windows categories. All of which focus on been in Hull and then on our specific mini websites again all focused on been in Hull – Hull-Blinds.co.uk, HullConservatories.co.uk and HullWindows.co.uk This gives your company 8 shots at any one search when people perform a search instead of the usual 2 shots. If you need this explaining a little better please do contact me.

I could write a book on how the network of websites would benefit your business. I’ll leave it there and just ask you to take a look, see how it works and if you do want a chat let me come and show you how it could work for your company!